Wynkoop’s barrels will soon have a new home – which will make Andy Brown happy (Kathryn Scott Osler, The Denver Post)

Denver’s pioneering Wynkoop Brewing Co. is planning to renovate basement space at its LoDo home that is now home to the Impulse Theater, making room for an expanded barrel-aging program and a tasting room to show off its recent move toward more experimental beers.

Wynkoop head brewer Andy Brown said he wants to build “a nicer, classier space” for tastings, tours and more, and take advantage of the space to build a more ambitious barrel program. He said the renovation will allow the brewery to bring in foudres, towering oak barrels it will use to create sour beer.

“It’s going to be really cool,” Brown said. “It keeps me interested and challenged, and lets me make a lot more different styles of beer, which we are trying to do here. And sour beers are all the rage.”

To coincide with GABF Week, we’re profiling a handful of Denver restaurants that take their beer seriously. You can click here to read our Wednesday Food section story. Here at First Drafts, we’re taking a deeper look at each featured restaurant because the Internet has no word count. Next up: Fruition.

Fruition Restaurant: Big things in small spaces

Eric Borg has all of two shelves of downstairs storage space in the tight quarters of Fruition in which to build a beer program.

At The Kitchen, a cucumber saison pairs well with a chicken dish – find out why below (photo by Cyrus McCrimmon)

To coincide with GABF Week, we’re profiling a handful of Denver restaurants that take their beer seriously. Our first post profiled Euclid Hall. Below, a look at The Kitchen Denver. Check our Wednesday Food section online and in print for the piece on all five, complete with food and beer pairings.

The Kitchen Denver: A house beer and a little education

Behold, the Kitchen Kolsch. The house beer at the LoDo outpost of the growing empire that is the Kitchen Community is a product of Prost Brewing, which brews German-styles beers just a few blocks away.

Plenty to smile about at Hops and Pie this week (that’s bartender Adam Del Re, photo by Grant Hindsley, The Denver Post).

We launched our blog post tracking this year’s GABF Week happenings way back on August 10 when word of planned events first started trickling in. (Oskar Blues Ordeal, has it been that long?). Since then, the post has kept growing and growing, testing the very limits of the Internet.

The task of deciding what to hit this week can be daunting. So we’ve compiled a list of our picks – the tappings, dinners and tours that sound most intriguing.

Old Chicago looked at current trends in the craft beer scene and didn’t see them reflected in the chain’s 96 restaurants throughout the country. So, they decided to change some things.

The brand redesign of the chain – founded in Boulder in 1976 with a focus on pizza and a wide lineup of beer – is taking a cue from blossoming craft brew pubs by bringing in more “hyper-local” breweries, paying attention to glass quality and cleanliness, and beefing up employee beer knowledge.

“So it doesn’t feel as much as a stuffy pub; a little bit more of a hip, social gastro pub, beer bar,” said Daniel Imdieke, Old Chicago’s new nationwide manager of beer operations. Imdieke recently moved to Broomfield, near where the company is based, to take the job after a nine-year stint at California-based chain Yard House, where he started as a bartender at one of the company’s first stores in Irvine and worked his way up to beverage management.Read more…

About 15 months ago, David Parry reinvented his eponymous New York-style pizza chain south of Denver as a craft beer paradise, adding taps and filling them with the best of what Colorado and the nation have to offer while preserving the family-friendly feel befitting the suburbs.

This Saturday brings a heady endorsement of that decision – Avery Brewing is replicating its Boulder taproom experience by hosting gigantic tap takeovers at Parry’s Pizzeria and Bar locations in Highland Ranch, Castle Rock and Greenwood Village, with 30 beers at each location.

If the deal comes together – and that remains a big ‘if’ – fast-growing Crazy Mountain would remain based in the Vail Valley and keep brewing there while using the 50-barrel Breckenridge brewhouse as its main production brewery, co-owners Kevin and Marisa Selvy said.

“It’s just too good an opportunity to pass up,” Kevin Selvy said Tuesday.

[media-credit name=”provided by Hops and Pie” align=”alignright” width=”270″][/media-credit] An unusual collaboration at one of the city’s finest beer bars

Collaborations between craft breweries are commonplace these days – friends and colleagues getting together to pool time, talent and ingredients to create unusual and fun beers.

A different kind of collaboration will be introduced at an unofficial launch of Colorado Craft Beer Week this month: one involving a local beer bar, five area breweries and five Maker’s Mark whiskey barrels.

The northwest Denver craft beer destination Hops and Pie secured the wood from Rocky Mountain Barrel Company and made them available to the five breweries in August. The fruits of the experiment will be available for drinking Saturday, March 16, at one of Hops and Pie’s regular Littlest Big Beer Fests.

The movie theater and its adjacent bar, Glass Half Full, will pull exclusively from Colorado-rooted taps — 32 craft beers from 20 local breweries. The heavy-hitters are well represented, including New Belgium, Odell, Boulder Beer, Oskar Blues and Great Divide. But the beer fans at Alamo are also including some brews you don’t often find at area bars, including Grim Brothers, Prost, Crazy Mountain and Tommyknocker.

“I’ve been given an enviable task of being a beer nerd up here in Denver, and I knew that with such an educated audience, we couldn’t half-ass it,” said Brian Mills, the bar manager of the Littleton Drafthouse’s in-house bar, Glass Half Full. “We had to do the research, and we needed to start those relationships with the breweries. In addition to starting a relationship with the distributors, I had to go to all these breweries and taste their beers.”

[media-credit name=”Provided by Breckenridge Brewing” align=”aligncenter” width=”495″][/media-credit] Renderings of the new Breckenridge digs

The lid has been lifted on one of the worst-kept secrets in Colorado brewing: Breckenridge Brewery is building a $20 million brewery complex on 12 acres along the South Platte River in Littleton that will both give it desperately needed room to grow and serve as a tourist destination.

The fifth largest brewer based in Colorado has been searching for a new, larger home after multiple years of double-digit growth caused it to outgrow its existing brewery on Kalamath Street in Denver.

Breckenridge is under contract to purchase the property from Designs by Sundown – a landscape architecture and construction firm – for $2.7 million, said Todd Usry, Breckenridge brewmaster and director of brewing.

Our new iPad app serves as a guide to metro Denver’s bountiful breweries, beer bars and bottle shops, the holy trinity of craft beer enjoyment for followers and fans. Download the app for iPad .
Next time you head for a beer in Boulder, don’t forget your friend, Beers of Boulder and Boulder County, an iPad app from the Daily Camera. Download the app for iPad .

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In Colorado, our pint glasses overflow with excellent beer. New breweries, new batches, festivals every other week. How lucky are we? First Drafts is The Denver Post's beer blog aimed at helping you keep tabs on the state's ever-expanding craft beer culture. We offer a mash of news, event coverage, homegrown stories, tasting notes and tips to help you imbibe. Expert drinker or homebrewer? Let us know what you're loving about Colorado's beer scene. Not sure exactly what a firkin is? No worries, let us be your guide. Go ahead. Belly up and drink it in!